9 Responses to MiddLab Ideas

I’ve already done some work with Susan Burch (Life Stories), Dana Yeaton (Deconstructing Butter), Pat Manley (Spring Symposium), and Ally DeGraf (Mapping Colombian Islands), so I’ll continue working with them myself, but here are some other people who contacted me with ideas for MiddLab that you might want to talk to if none of the projects above appeal to you:

I would love to work on the Student video work from Sight and Sound project. I think we can make it different because we could have a section for each person featuring all of their work and comments about their work. Also, i think a unique and very cool thing we could do is possibly for one of their projects have them describe the preparations (how they got the idea, the storyboarding, the shooting, and the editing) and show the final product next to their dailies; to show how they went from raw material to edited product.

I am interested in working on a Middlab page displaying works from student publications, such as Blackbird, Sweatervest, and Midd Geographic. I know that these publications technically have their own web sites, but I always have a hard time finding them, (like right now) and don’t remember seeing a whole lot visually about the content of the magazines. I think it’d be great to make a middlab page that allowed people to browse the images and writing of current literary magazine issues.

I also would like to do the online recreations of the student magazines on campus. I think that they could be digitized so that people can read them without a tangible copy. This could make the publications available to anybody across the country/world. This would make it easier for people that have graduated and that were involved or anybody that wasn’t even involved to be able to read the publication. There could also be a part of the website dedicated to feedback about the magazine and could be utilized for people to say what they would like to see in the future issues. This in turn could raise the amount of people that see the magazine and could integrate new “digital” positions for people to moderate what should be in future issues and to respond to people giving input. I think that one central location for all magazines and newspapers would make it easier for people to access the works and would spread the visibility to people that usually wouldn’t pick up an actual copy of it.

I am not sure what the deal is with groups or if we are supposed to be working solo, but I would also like to help out with the sight & sound work if that is something middlab would be interested. As someone who has taken both sight and sounds I think that getting feedback is one of the most important parts of video production and I think middlab could be a great way to private students with that.

i was also interested in the idea of digitizing student lit mags & other publications, and i like the ideas hunter threw out in his comment. but hannah and hunter have already expressed their interest in this project, and if it doesn’t need 3 people working on it, i’m interested in julia alverez’s project as well. it sound like something that would display really well in a photo or video format. it says she’s expressed interest in middlab already; does ian know more about this? or, since liya suggested the idea, maybe she expressed interest to liya? i’ll get more info in class.

Hello again! I’m back from a rather lengthy vacation and wanted to follow up on some of the ideas you’ve tossed out in the comments here. I see that the most popular project ideas involve digitizing work related to a course or collections of assorted student work. I think there is value in doing this work, but it differs from what we’d typically look for in a MiddLab *project*.

A MiddLab project is something of an atomic unit that displays work by one person or a group of people who have been working together and have developed a single result artifact or a set of materials related to a single topic. The idea is to then give people a forum for discussion that focuses on this topic. So Professor Plum has been doing research on the differences between skull fractures from wrenches versus lead pipes and has a paper and a video on the topic. Then people can discuss that work and that’s what we’d consider a “MiddLab project”.

Now there’s another aspect of MiddLab, which is the hope that we can use it as a portal into databases of information: the thesis database, digital archives, the economics working papers database, and present that information… somehow. There’s been a lot less thought put into this side of MiddLab since “MiddLab projects” are easier to envision and build, but this database portal is something that we’ll eventually need to tackle.

So, I think it’s great that you’re interested in helping transfer some of the work for S&S and student publications into digital form and using MiddLab as a vehicle for sharing that information. However, you should understand that we can’t really build a MiddLab project page about these, so it would be helpful if, as part of the work you’re doing, you think about how we can use MiddLab to provide access to these digital collections.

To answer a question on another topic, from Toren: no I haven’t heard anything about the Julia Alvarez project, other than what appears here. However, this sounds like a good example of a MiddLab project.

I would like to either work on putting sight and sound work online or student publications. Given that most major publications are online now (including the Middlebury Campus!) I definitely think that other student work should be available over the internet too.